Hey Cato — consistent libertarianism!

Will wonders never cease? Dom Armentano finally got a UFO piece picked up by the mainstream press — and in the Orange County Register, no less.

Over the weekend, the Vero Beach rez reviewed the latest photo analysis of a puzzling UFO sequence snapped over southern California in 1965 by highway maintenance engineer Rex Heflin. Skeptics and advocates have long squabbled over the merits of the Heflin pix, but the most recent research suggests the pictures reflect an authentic mystery.

On the controversy scale, the Heflin photos are mid-range, and Armentano’s careful approach is anything but sensationalist. What makes publication noteworthy is how the PhD economist had to endure so much crap just to bring something this mild into the MSM domain.

In January 2008, Armentano got canned without warning as an adjunct scholar with the libertarian Cato Institute for advocating government transparency and accountability on the UFO issue in a Vero Beach Press-Journal guest column. The move was so visceral and immediate it was as if he’d gotten fired for issuing a racial epithet.

Armentano, professor emeritus in economics from the University of Hartford, was informed by Cato’s knee-jerk executive VP David Boaz that his editorial position was “not an issue that we want to have as part of Cato’s research agenda.” Even though libertarians tout the virtues of an unregulated marketplace of ideas. Even though Armentano never advocated such an initiative for Cato. Even though Armentano never mentioned his affiliation with Cato.

This summer, in response to a Christian Science Monitor opinion piece alluding to the 1947 Roswell Incident as a hoax, Armentano — who had an unrelated antitrust-themed op-ed published by the Monitor in May — approached the paper about a rebuttal. Without even reading his essay, the editor rejected the proposal by stating the issue “simply didn’t rise to a sufficient level of public salience and/or newsworthiness.”

So on Saturday, look who actually ran with Armentano’s latest — the OCR, a property of Freedom Communications, Inc., out of Santa Ana, Calif. The Register has a long and consistent track record for espousing libertarian positions on its editorial pages.

But as Armentano told De Void, “I think we got the right venue with them. The photos were taken in Orange County, so this (article) might not have gone anywhere else. It may have been just a lucky hit.”

That’s probably true. And it did hit the Web on — ahem — Halloween. So De Void will retract an initial impulse to give the Register a medal for doing its job, and make a simple pitch for the future: Keep it up.